


these burning bones

by bossymarmalade (maggie)



Category: Generation X (Comic)
Genre: Character Study, Character of Colour, F/F, First Kiss, Longing, Schoolgirls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-02
Updated: 2010-09-02
Packaged: 2017-10-13 05:36:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/133545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggie/pseuds/bossymarmalade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For once, Paige is changing from the inside out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	these burning bones

**Author's Note:**

> standard foreword: if i have written something problematic/oppressive to a marginalized group that you find hurtful, please please please don't think twice about telling me. i will never spew hate at you, will never attack you, and i will always thank you and make the change.

Paige goes home for a while to see her folks, and she can't stop thinking about how much she'd wanted to be here and how much she can't stop wanting to be back at the Massachusetts Academy. She thinks about it while she's shaking out the duvets on her bed and her sisters' beds and her brothers' beds; she thinks about it while she's walking through sunshine-drenched elbow-high wheat in a homemade pink dress; she thinks about it while she's carefully, carefully biting her lip and pressing her fingers against her damp panties in the middle of the night.

There's a postcard, one week in. A picture of a cartoon rabbit fishing at a waterhole, and on the back there's messages from everybody, unsigned. Paige drags her fingertip over the pen impressions, feeling laconic Angelo here, reserved Monet here, cheerful Everett here. Jono's thoughtful pen-strokes crammed up against Jubilee's heavy strokes covering most of it. She could lick the card and feel her tongue dipping into each crevice.

Her parents are almost relieved when Paige takes a fever over the weekend, because it explains to them why she's been acting so strange. For her part, she piles calico quilts and feather ticks on herself, drinking small hot cups of tea and sweating and sweating, hoping the fever she feels in her bones will drain out as well and sprawl soaking into the coverlets, to be washed away in the laundry and bleached inert by the sun.

When the fever finally breaks and she can get up again, Paige sits on a tree stump out back of the house with her momma's heavy fabric shears dangling from her fingers. Her dress rustles up from her knees and she can feel the scratch of the bark on her shins. Her hair falls in twists and twirls of gold when she angles the scissors into it, snipping and cutting with long, deliberate upward slices.

It's all piecey and awkward and her mom can barely look at her. But Paige likes it, the way that tendrils separate and curl a little to clasp against her cheeks, her forehead; the way it constantly looks like she just tumbled out of bed, like she's left some lover's fingers itching in its absence. The clutch of _longing_ in her chest loosens, smooths, and she thinks about going back to school as if it's going back home.

\---

When she does get back, it's late at night. Her bus got late somewhere in Utica when the driver got a phone call telling him that his sister had passed away, and Paige sat for a long, dreary hour next to a boy with doodled-on Converses who wanted to tell her all his cynical and edgy thoughts on death. "It's so organic," he said, "how just this voice dropping out of the night -- bam! -- brings tidings of ending, just like that."

You're lucky when you get tidings, Paige wanted to tell him. If you're very unlucky, you get to see death unfurling in front of you, graceless and starving.

The school is dark and she winds deeper into it, feeling damp from how thick the night is outside and how long she's been travelling. Nobody's awake in the rec room, nobody's having a midnight bowl of cereal, nobody's battling demons in the Danger Grotto; it's a weirdly still feeling but Paige leans into it, eagerly.

She watches her feet as she climbs up the stairs to the dorm rooms, her ballet flats going soft and dull at the toes. She passes doors, one two three, and when she gets to the one she wants Paige doesn't bother knocking.

It's quiet inside but somehow less quiet than the rest of the school. Jubilee's in bed, breathing warm and sweet, and around her the ephemera of her room, of her life, glitters and sparkles even in the darkness. Paige lets it all sink into her and feels it replacing the fever in her bones, and for the first time, she's sure about this.

The bed dips only a little bit when she sits on it (Jubes likes a firm mattress, one you can really get a good bounce on, and didn't Paige's mind do a flip-flop when she'd announced _that_ ), and Paige holds her breath until she starts seeing spots. "Jubes," she lets herself whisper, finally. "Jubilee. Wake up." Her fingers slip into Jubilee's hair, avoiding the pale curves of shoulder, of throat, of cheek; she can wait.

They're very well-trained and Jubilee's had to be more alert than most, so she's awake between one groggy breath and the next, sitting up, face turning against Paige's hand. "Hayseed?" she says, voice roughly catching on itself. "I thought you'd still be back at the homestead, dreaming of shortstacks and maple syrup and dairy cows." Jubilee's usually-sharp voice is flattened by sleep and Paige bites her lip and carefully, carefully, lets her hand drift. Down Jubilee's high cheekbone, her rounded chin, her so-pink rosebud mouth, and oh yes, _there's_ the reaction she wants, an indrawn breath and sigh all in one as Jubilee tips her head back a little and her breasts shift under the camisole she sleeps in. Paige expected a tank top, maybe a t-shirt, but no, it's a jade-green nylon camisole with scalloped embroidery that kisses just where Jubilee's breasts start to shade towards intimacy.

"I kept thinking about you," she says, and somewhere deep inside her there's a girl who's pressing mortified fingers to her mouth, terrified by this naked declaration. This voice, organic, dropping out of the night with its craving of a beginning. "The whole time there, I kept thinking about you." Time stretches out with nothing but the warm, deep smell of Jubilee's bed between them, her sleep-soft skin, and Paige forces herself to wait and wait until Jubilee looks down and her long, dark lashes look like closed crescents.

Paige gasps and is glad for it, because it covers the whimpering noise that accompanies her breath. She rustles backward until her thigh slides off the bed and her head is swimming, chanting _i don't know why you even tried, you stupid girl, i don't know why you thought she'd be good with this_ , but then Jubilee lurches forward and she's a gymnast but her hands still slip awkwardly across Paige's thighs, fingers digging in to hold her still.

"I didn't," she starts, then cuts herself off and presses her mouth against Paige's in a rush of bubblegum chapstick and hot, soft tongue, and one of her arms is wrapping around Paige's waist while her other hand cups a breast and when she stops kissing they're both panting, Paige arching into Jubilee's touch with a moan.

"I didn't, "Jubilee says again, licking Paige's collarbone, "didn't know you wanted this kind of change, Paige. You never seemed --" Jubilee's fingers have reached Paige's hair, now, and she cuts herself off and pulls back to blink at it, fingering the angled, curling tips. "I take it back," Jubilee says, her tone shifting into something darker, hotter. Paige slips her hands underneath Jubilee's camisole, hauling them closer together, and murmurs, "Take everything."

There's a fire inside her bones still, but it's not the sun-bleached fever of before. It's sparkles and glitter, and it's everything she knows she wants.


End file.
